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Ginny Field
|portrayer=Amy Steel |occupation=Camp counselor (former) Psychologist |fullname=Virginia "Ginny" Field |family= }} Ginny Field is a fictional character in the ''Friday the 13th'' franchise, portrayed by Amy Steel. Introduced in Steve Miner's sequel Friday the 13th Part 2 in 1981, Ginny is an aspiring child psychologist who is hired as an assistant to Paul Holt at the Packanack Lodge, a site Paul plans to transform into a counselor training center which is located near the infamous Camp Crystal Lake. Ginny, who believes that the legend of Jason Voorhees is more than a myth, soon encounters the vengeful killer and realizes that she must delve into his psyche if she wants to survive. Originally in Friday the 13th Part III (1982), Ginny's role in the film was supposed to be similar to Laurie Strode's in Halloween II (1981) with Ginny being pursued in a mental asylum by Voorhees just like Michael Myers stalked Strode in the hospital. However, Steel feared being typecast and ultimately turned down the offer to reprise her role. She subsequently appears in Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter (1984) through archive footage. She also appears in the ''Friday the 13th'' expanded universe, appearing in the novelizations and merchandise based on the films. Some scholars regard Ginny as an example of the "final girl" archetype. Appearances In film In Friday the 13th Part 2, Ginny is an aspiring child psychologist who is Paul Holt's girlfriend, she arrives at Crystal Lake late for training. At the campfire that night, Paul tells the camp counselors the legend of Jason Voorhees and the disappearance of Alice which occurred months after Jason allegedly witnessed his mother being beheaded, to scare the other counselors from entering Camp Crystal Lake. Later on, Paul offers them a trip to the next town, but only Ginny and Ted accept his offer. At a bar, Ginny admits that she takes the legend of "Camp Blood" seriously. She feels sympathetic towards Jason Voorhees, because of his traumatic childhood and she believes the legends of him witnessing Alice beheading his mother. Meanwhile, Jason begins to murder all of the counselors. When Ginny and Paul return, she believes that something is wrong. Ginny is soon forced to fight for her life. After Jason knocks Paul out, Ginny becomes his new target. After an evading Jason numerous times and fighting back, Ginny stumbles across Jason's shack in the woods, and finds a shrine for Pamela Voorhees. She puts on an old sweater, belonging to Pamela, in effort to convince Jason Voorhees that she is his mother. Jason believes her, and she manages to calm him down before he notices his mother's head behind Ginny. He then slices open Ginny's leg just as Paul comes in. As Jason prepares to kill Paul, Ginny comes up behind Jason and drives a machete into his shoulder. In the end of the film, Ginny is seen being carried away in a stretcher, crying out for Paul, whose fate is unknown. Friday the 13th Part III picks up directly after the second film, with Ginny Field shown being pulled away on a stretcher during a news report detailing the ordeal she survived. Originally, Ginny was set to return as a main character in Part III but Amy Steel feared being typecast and officially decided to not return when her agent of the time convinced her to decline the offer. Her role in the film would have been similar to Laurie Strode's in Halloween II (1981). According to Kelly Konda, "Director Steve Miner and Martin Kitrosser, the script supervisor for Parts 1 and 2 and co-writer of Part 3, wanted Ginny to go to a mental institution as a result of her trauma after Part 2. Jason would eventually arrive to settle his vendetta against her, killing any guards, doctors, or patients that got in his way." However, producers soon became skeptical of the idea and eventually abandoned it when Steel officially declined to return. When asked why she didn't reprise her role as the lead character in Part III, Steel confirmed her fear of being typecast and her subsequent regret of declining the offer to return, stating: :"When I finished filming Part 2, I was trashed. I was exhausted. But that’s not why I didn’t do Part 3. I wanted to be taken seriously as an actress. At the time there was still a stigma associated with horror movies. Jamie Lee Curtis changed that . . . but the roles were limited. It was mostly about screaming. I regret not doing the third film. It’s one of my biggest regrets." : Ginny appears in Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter (1984) through archive footage which is currently the last Friday the 13th film that she Ginny appears in. In literature Ginny makes her first literary appearance in the novelization of Friday the 13th Part 3 (1982), which states that she is in "serious condition" and is suffering from "severe hysterical shock: because of her battle with Jason Voorhees. She subsequently appears as the lead protagonist in Friday the 13th Part II: A Novel, a novelization of the 1981 film Friday the 13th Part 2, which was released seven years after the film premiered in February 1988. The novel was written by Simon Hawke and based on Ron Kurz's screenplay. The aftermath of her encounter with Jason is once again referenced in the novel Friday the 13th: Carnival of Maniacs, which states that her claims of finding Jason's shack in the woods went ignored, due to the authorities doubting her sanity. In merchandise In 2014, Fright-Rags released Ginny's Revenge, a Horror T-shirt with Ginny being the main part of the design. It received a limited release with only 300 shirts being sold. The cost of the shirts were $27 with sizes ranging from S-5X, Girls S-2X. In 2017, Ginny was featured on the design of another Fright-Rags T-shirt entitled Victims and Survivors. In video games In Friday the 13th: The Game (2017), Ginny is referenced in the Virtual Cabin 2.0 mode. When viewing the statue of Jason's design from Friday the 13th Part 2, his biography states, "Only the aspiring child psychologist, Ginny Field, is able to outsmart and eventually "defeat" Jason. She puts on Pamela's sweater to trigger Jason, and then buries a machete deep into his shoulder..." She is also referenced in the biography for Jason's design from Friday the 13th Part III which states that Jason barely survived his encounter with Ginny. Development In an interview, Amy Steel discussed her audition for the film, stating: :"At the time of the film, it was before the genre really picked up so I didn’t give it a lot of credit or take it seriously. For me, it was just another audition because I had no idea what it would end up meaning after all this time. When I played Ginny, I was really young and different from a lot of the people working at the time so that came out in my character. I was naturally suspicious of cocky guys at that age, and you see a lot of that when I’m on screen with Paul (John Furey). I tried to put so much behind the actual words in the script just so she felt almost unreachable, to Paul and to audiences. I wanted her to have some power." : While discussing the character, Steel described the parallels between herself and Ginny and praised the character's intelligence and strength, noting: :"I think I got lucky with the role of Ginny, on a couple of fronts. She's pretty much who I am. It wasn't really much of a stretch. We have the same energy, so you could say I was typecast. But the hard part is really owning who we are as women, all the strength, faith, and calm ... at the same time." : She then said she liked the character because she wasn't a "total bimbo" and that she was "smart and confident and you knew she had something driving her." Reception In The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film, Barry Keith Grant stated that, "Ginny temporarily adopts Mrs. Voorhees's authoritarian role to survive. Although circumstances necessitate this, she clearly uses her enemy's strategy to become a phallic mother herself. This posture really questions the positive image of the Final Girl." He then called her "not victorious" when she called out for her boyfriend at the end of the film saying that it was done in a "non-independent manner". John Kenneth Muir references Ginny in Horror Films of the 1980s, Volume 1, saying "Amy Steel is introduced as Ginny, our final girl and heroine, and the only person who seems to have an inkling of the nearby danger. She's more resourceful than Alice and nearly upstages even Laurie Strode during the film's tense finale, wherein she brazenly dresses up as Jason's dead mother and starts barking orders at the confused serial killer." In Blood Money: A History of the First Teen Slasher Film Cycle, Richard Nowell said "The shift in characterization of the female leads was also trumpeted during Ginny's self-confident entrance (Amy Steel) in Friday the 13th Part II. Where the makers of its predecessor introduced Alice as she prepared cabins while dressed in denim jeans and a shapeless lumberjack shirt, the sequel's conventionally attractive lead is established immediately as combining masculine traits with feminine attributes. Ginny exits a battered VW bug in a flowing fuchsia skirt and a low-cut t-shirt." In Horror and the Horror Film, Bruce F. Kawin states that "The heroine and survivor, Ginny (Amy Steel), is not a virgin, though she is having her period and may gain from that some blood power against Jason. Ginny is majoring in Child Psychology, which lets her deal with Jason (who, she deduces, has the mind of child fixated on the mother he saw killed because she loved him) when she pretends to be his mother. She survives partly because she takes children's emotions seriously." In 2012, Complex ranked Ginny 16th on their list of The 25 Most Badass Horror Movie Heroines. In 2016, Paste ranked Ginny 17th on their list of The 20 Best "Final Girls" in Horror Movie History, calling her "a realistic girl of her time period who, at the same time, has the guts and resolve to face off against Jason (sans hockey mask, which he didn’t get until the third film) and come out on top." See also *Final girl *Laurie Strode *Nancy Thompson References External links * Ginny Field on IMDb Category:Warner Bros. characters Category:Horror film characters Category:Female characters in film Category:Child characters in film Category:Final girls Category:Friday the 13th characters Category:Fictional feminist characters Category:Fictional sole survivors Category:Fictional psychologists Category:Fictional characters introduced in 1981